Award ladders key to strong faculty recognition culture

More than 1,300 current KU faculty have received honorific awards for their outstanding scholarly achievements from foundations, societies, government entities and industry, as well as from the university itself. For KU to multiply those numbers and contribute to a broader culture of faculty recognition, we must establish award ladders that guide faculty along a pathway to increasingly prestigious honors.

The pursuit of awards not only adds to a faculty member’s record of accomplishment, but it also validates the high standards and importance of their research and elevates KU’s reputation as a leading research university producing a wide array of discoveries that benefit society.

KU’s annual University Research Awards recognize talented individuals — faculty at various stages of their careers, postdocs, and research staff — for outstanding work. Whether this is their first such honor or one of several, university awards increase their visibility and strengthen future nominations.

In the coming months, I will work with KU’s Core Nominating Committee — composed of unit awards committee chairs — to identify discipline-specific awards for which faculty may be eligible. For external awards designated by the National Research Council as “prestigious” or “highly prestigious” (which the AAU uses to rank its member institutions), the Academic Analytics data portal includes a feature mapping possible pathways to achieving them.

This fall, I will begin offering personalized sessions to faculty interested in developing a multi-year plan to position themselves to become eligible for various research awards. The plan could include identifying potential collaborators at other institutions because those colleagues often serve as nominators or write letters of support. An awards plan also helps ensure that requirements for a particular honorific are being met, such as the four-year membership necessary to be eligible for nomination as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow.

Award ladders, coupled with support for departments in assembling strong nomination packages, will be an important tool for achieving well-deserved recognition for more KU scholars. Finding multiple ways to celebrate those accomplishments will lead to a culture of recognition befitting a strong research university.